If the pace of the killing slows, that could buy time: time for economic sanctions to undermine the regime, time to cajole Russia to switch sides and help pull the rug out from Assad, but also time for the opposition and its new army to organize themselves into a more effective force.

An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under Annan’s leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of US goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts.

Brookings makes no secret that the humanitarian “responsibility to protect” is but a pretext for long-planned regime change. Not only has the US and NATO been lying to the world with the UN fully complicit, but they now are openly admitting as much: that their feigned aspirations to end the bloodshed in Syria is merely a ploy to buy time for their faltering proxy terrorist force to reorganize itself and finish dividing and destroying Syria as NATO-proxies have thoroughly done in Libya. NATO admits that military intervention is not a matter of “if” but a matter of “when,” depending on a predetermined number of objectives that must be achieved first. These include the Syrian opposition getting better organized, assurances that military aid wouldn’t fall into the hands of “radical Islamists,” and for Turkey, just as Brookings previously stated, “to establish safe havens for the opposition along its border with Syria.”

Certainly, openly conspiring to wage a war of aggression, when Syria has in no way threatened any NATO member nor the national security of the US, is a Nuremberg offense, a crime against humanity. The chaos unfolding inside Syria today is not the result of a government wantonly killing its own population, but a documented case of a government fighting an overtly foreign-funded armed group, carrying out atrocities on par with anything the Syrian government has been accused of, this according to the West’s own Human Rights Watch. Compounding their criminality is the fact that instead of taking advantage of a ceasefire to broker a peace deal and begin reconciliation, they are instead using the lull in fighting to prepare the next round of bloodshed they are fully prepared to fund and arm. Far from speculation, the conclusion that NATO is guilty of crimes against humanity is based on the West’s own UN, which stands in violation of its own laws stemming from WW2, Nazi aggression, and the conclusions drawn from the Nuremberg trials (description of Nuremberg counts begins on page 23 of the .pdf). Failure in Syria by the forces of NATO and their accomplices in the UN would ultimately undermine permanently their authority, their legitimacy, and their perceived moral superiority. Expect them to stop at nothing to topple the Syrian government, regardless of how tenuous their position increasingly becomes.